If Someone Stole Your Song

Ask a search engine or AI what to do when someone steals your song, and you’ll find a bunch of useless information written by people who’ve never analyzed music professionally. I just looked myself, and they all say the same things: “Document everything. Collect your original files, your demos, and make sure everything is time-stamped so you can prove you created the song first. Then call a lawyer!”

That advice is not great. None of them tells you what actually matters. If you searched for that phrase — or its mirror image, “did I steal someone’s song?” — here’s a real answer from someone who actually does this work.

I’m a forensic musicologist. I analyze music for copyright infringement cases. I’ve been retained by plaintiffs who think they were ripped off and defendants who swear they never heard the other song. I’ve served as an expert witness. I know what holds up and what doesn’t.

These are better answers — not legal advice, I’m not your lawyer — but you’re trying to figure out first steps and whether you have a case or whether you’re in trouble, or maybe you’re just curious about the whole subject.

1. Find an Attorney

Yes, you’ll eventually want a good lawyer — not a generalist, but an attorney who specializes in intellectual property. If you make attorneys your first call, they’ll tell you the next two good bits of advice: you’re going to need your copyright registration, and you’re going to need a forensic musicologist’s opinion.

2. Copyright Registration

Everyone seems to know that copyright just exists from the moment you create something. That’s fine as far as it goes. But to actually sue someone in federal court, you need registration — the real kind. It’s not a “you should,” it’s a “you must.” The Copyright Office has to process your application and issue a registration certificate before you can file suit. This is not optional.

Creators, consider making registration part of your process, because if you ever think somebody has stolen your song, this part may sting. When you registered matters almost as much as that you registered at all. If you registered before an infringement occurs, you’re eligible for statutory damages and attorney’s fees. If you registered after that window, you can only recover actual damages and profits. It’s a big deal. Statutory damages are a significant weapon for an IP lawyer — up to $150,000 per willful infringement, roughly ten times the amount available for innocent infringement.

Timestamps on your demo files, like those other websites suggest? Small potatoes compared to a registration certificate. And besides, most of the time “which came first” isn’t the dispute anyway. If the defendant could have heard your song in the first place, that’s called access, and it’s the necessary second concern after registration. You can search google for “access” and “musicologize” and find plenty on why it’s usually the first real battle in an infringement case.

Many infringement claims fall apart here. Either there’s no registration, or there’s no plausible way the defendant heard the plaintiff’s song. The rest rely on step three.

3. Find a Forensic Musicologist

A musicologist will analyze the music and evaluate the significance of any similarities. You already know the two pieces sound similar to you. But your attorney is probably not a music expert, and a forensic musicologist will help you both understand what the notes say about the underlying composition and the veracity of a claim.

Both your lawyer and the courts care about specific musical elements that can be identified, isolated, and compared: melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, lyrics, if any. Courts also care about the “total concept and feel” and “ordinary observer” test. Both matter. Forensic musicology work deals primarily with the former. We call that the “extrinsic test.”

And here’s the part that trips everyone up. Similarity alone, even when noticeable, is not necessarily infringement. The standard is substantial similarity of protectable elements. Both parts of that phrase matter.

Not every part of your song is protected by copyright. Common chord progressions? Not protected. Standard song structures? Not protected. Genre conventions? Not protected. A blues turnaround, a four-chord pop progression, a typical verse-chorus form — these are all what courts call scènes à faire. It means “scenes to do,” as in: you’re not going to get very far writing songs without these commonly available tools. Say it with me: “not protected.” They’re basic building blocks. Nobody owns them.

What may be protected and even significant, however, is the original way you combined and expressed those elements — your particular melody, specific lyrical phrases, the way you shaped something that makes it yours.

Ears hear two songs that sound similar and assume infringement. But when I analyze them, I sometimes find completely different melodies over completely different chord progressions — the only similarity being that they’re both mid-tempo pop songs in 4/4 time with verse-chorus structure and similar production. Just two songs in the same genre.

One axiom of mine that confuses people at first: someone may deliberately copy your work and infringe nothing, if they copy only what nobody owns. It’s not copying that gets you into trouble. It’s copying what’s protectable. More on how that analysis actually works at Musicologize.

Another is: “Some notes are worth more than others.” In any familiar melody some notes are doing more work than others. Musicologists are doing math to some extent. More on that another time.